


Squires of the night's body

by Lilliburlero



Category: Henry IV Part 1 - Shakespeare, The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Genre: Alcohol, Crack, Crack Crossover, Crossover, M/M, Mid-Canon, Pre-Canon, Stealth Crossover, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-07
Updated: 2014-10-07
Packaged: 2018-02-20 06:57:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2419307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Ralph Lanyon goes on the tear with a man called Hal Fitzroy in Eastcheap, and with the exception of an arguably <i>trivial</i> detail, nothing very much goes wrong.</p><p>*</p><p>Content advisory: homophobic slur against sex workers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Squires of the night's body

**Author's Note:**

  * For [toujours_nigel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/gifts).
  * Inspired by [restless nights in one-night cheap hotels](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2408099) by [toujours_nigel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel). 



Ralph woke to the sight of a yellowed plaster ceiling, through the cracks of which showed cobwebby oak beams. He knew from bitter experience that this sense of relative wellbeing would not survive movement of his head, so he kept that rational member rigid. He explored gropingly the dimensions of last night’s couch. It was some sort of form or trestle, about twelve inches wide. It was all starting to come back to him. He’d arranged, with the usual misgivings, to meet Hal Fitzroy in the _discreet private dining-room_ (he knew what that meant, and it wasn’t a square meal, so he took care to provide himself with a fish supper on the way, reflecting that his habits were probably now proletarian beyond redemption) of a pub not too far from Billingsgate. He arrived with maritime promptitude ninety minutes before Hal turned up dishevelled to the point of deshabille, mud smeared camouflage-fashion over his cheeks, his arm slung hazardously about the neck of a foxy-faced bit of rent, and crowing incomprehensibly about robbery with violence. It transpired on Ralph's appeal to the foxy-faced man, who introduced himself only as Ned but spoke with an unexpected, reassuring Forest of Dean burr, that this had been in the line of an elaborate practical joke rather than an actual hold-up. But the money was real enough, and Ralph, feeling an essentially middle-class sense of relief which he hoped he’d adequately concealed from his aristocratic acquaintance (though not from Ned’s narrow, miss-nothing glare) helped them drink it. 

Five or six rounds later, the butts of the pleasantry, a hangdog fellow of indeterminate age with the worst dose of rosacea Ralph had ever seen and a corpulent, seedy, jocund man in his sixties, showed up vowing comic vengeance, the stout one so full of callow self-excuse that one might have thought he'd swallowed the Oxford Union whole and taken the clientele of the Cosmo in Wardour Street powdered for his indigestion. Ralph considered him unseemly. From then on, things got a bit hazier. Ralph remembered the fat man wearing a cushion on his head and impersonating Hal’s father, or King George, or somebody; and shortly afterwards making an unequivocal approach which made so little attempt to conceal the fact that Ralph was _faute de Fitz_ that he was half-minded to take it as calculated insult, and outside. But lacking some crucial component in his _amour propre_ that would induce him to violence in defence of his own honour, though he could be almost suicidally reckless in that of another’s, Ralph merely shrugged him off impatiently. Then Ned had jumped from a standing start onto a table without disturbing its freight of glasses, pint bottles of Guinness and ornamental Chianti fiasco, snatched a candle-end from the last of these and done something thoroughly obscene with it. By that time it was a lock-in, of course, to which the next guests to demand admission, with dismal inevitability, were the police. Before Ralph could despair or protest, he had been ushered through a door marked _Private_ , down a short staircase, through a chilly passage and into a pantry. He recognized in Ned’s manner exactly the gracious but unbending insistence with which he himself favoured passengers who had become tight and recalcitrant. 

‘They're sure to search in here.’

‘They will if you keep roaring like that, yes. Shut up, do. Nellie can handle them.’ Ned made a gesture indeterminate between _greased palm_ and _toss-off_. ‘There, down between the tinned peaches and the meat safe. Bags of room.’ He compressed himself into the same gap, perhaps eighteen inches square.

Ralph felt all the revulsion of affinity for him, and that combined with extreme proximity had a result as predictable as it was inopportune. With tact atypical of his calling Ned pretended not to notice. They waited a decent interval after hearing the landlady, a merry note of dismissal in her voice marking victory in this latest battle of a ceaseless campaign, bid good evening to the officers of the City of London force. Ned unwedged himself and remarked absently, ‘Sorry, dearie. Some other time.’ Ralph began to suspect that whatever Ned was exactly, it wasn’t rent.

They’d carried on drinking for a while with the heavy, dilatory resolve of a party that has suffered lethal interruption and is determined to show itself unbowed, and at some point soon after Ralph’s recollective faculty ceased.

He raised his head and body cautiously; the wave of nausea swelled and broke at the attainment of approximately 70 degrees to the bench. Mastered, it was replaced by a headache in the acute phase. He looked around him. He didn’t remember the place being quite as tweely Arts-and-Crafty as this: were those hand-thrown mugs on the sticky, puddled tables? And why hadn't they been cleared up, when all the glasses and ashtrays had? Had that Puginesque carved chair been there last night? But everyone was here: the rosacea case mercifully face down on one of the tables, Ned and Hal in one another’s arms in the sawdust (no, _not rent_ ) covered by a makeshift blanket of flour sacks. From a curtained-off alcove rose the bubbling, brutish snore characteristic of an obese subject. Ralph checked his pockets. There was his latchkey and almost as much money as he’d arrived with, old Fitzer having treated expansively. He cursed softly to find his cigarette case empty: he could have sworn he’d had at least a couple left. Well, it had been diverting: he’d had far worse nights. It was about four miles from here to Paddington, he reckoned: he’d walk it in an hour, clear his head. There was a side door through which he might make an unobtrusive exit. His hand on the brittle iron latch, he took a last look back. Ned shifted and murmured, turning his face into Hal’s chest so that only his red-brown curls were visible above the edge of the sacking. Ralph yawned deliberately and wiped his eyes with finger and thumb.

The early autumn morning was dazzling, the mist already burned away. The streets were quiet, drowsing through that vacant hour or two between the tail-end of the fish market and the beginning of the business day. Through a crapulous squint, London looked huddled, diminished and flimsy, like a child’s toy theatre version of itself. Ralph felt sick and dizzy again: everything had a disturbingly wrong shape. Looking up, he swithered on his heel, seeking a landmark—the city always contrived at some point, however often he came here, to make him feel bucolic—and found one. It came, however, not from general knowledge but a memory of his last year of private school, an engraving reproduced in a textbook, and the murderous vehemence of English schoolboys on certain polarizing matters touching their island story. Ralph’s stubborn partisanship of Wren and neo-classical proportion had turned sectarian, ending definitively his obscurely thrilling friendship with Merrick— _Alexander_ Merrick—when only the week before they had come to share the unprecedented, gloriously transgressive intimacy of addressing one another by their Christian names. His back to the sun’s golden disc, Ralph stared disbelievingly north-west towards the eminence of Ludgate Hill, where loomed the spire of St Paul’s Cathedral, a black shard jagging into a crisp, unpolluted blue sky.

**Author's Note:**

> Given my Particular Interests, this had to happen eventually, though I always imagined that the Renault character to stumble into this crossover would be Julian Fleming. But I just couldn't ignore [a fic](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2408099) in which Ralph Lanyon and Alec Deacon are introduced by a mutual acquaintance called Hal Fitzroy.


End file.
